Now the legal brains behind the
epic lawsuit, the U.S. Copyright Group (USCG), have revealed plans to
send tens of thousands of more “pay up or else” threat
letters to those who downloaded other films.

Thomas
Dunlap, leader of the group, created a website where industry
officials could go to see informative videos. In the videos
Dunlap brags about how easy it is to squeeze money out of
filesharers. Dunlap promises to handle infringement problems
for studios in exchange for a hefty cut — 70 percent of the
settlement.

According to the USCG’s claims, the organization is
currently tracking 300 films each with 500 tracked file-sharers,
making for a total of around 150,000 potential targets at risk of
receiving a settlement letter. USCG suggests that it can send a
“speculative invoice” to these individuals demanding
between a $1,500 to $2,500 USD settlement. That means that
taking the middle of the settlement figures ($2,000), the USCG could
try to pull in as much as $300M USD in revenue from the scheme, and
pocket $210M USD of that sum.

ACLU lawyer Rachel Myers argues
that this scheme may be an abuse of the U.S. legal system.
She writes:

Last
week, we
filed friend-of-the-court briefs in support of Time
Warner Cable’s motion to quash or modify the subpoenas it
received for information about thousands of users who allegedly
downloaded certain movies from the Internet using the BitTorrent file
sharing application. We
argue that the subpoenas, which lump thousands of
otherwise-unrelated individuals into a few cases filed in a court far
from where any of them live, violate the individual users’ rights to
due process and anonymity and don’t give them an adequate chance to
defend themselves.

Despite an early court victory Judge Collyer of the District of Columbia has
demanded a review of the settlement plan.

Even without court
approvals, though, the group can still forward non-court-endorsed
letters through ISPs, assuming the ISPs prove willing to cooperate.
Several ISPs have already cooperated with such schemes from groups
like Nexicon.